Various thermal management approaches have been proposed to improve heat transfer from optoelectronic and electronic devices to external heat dissipaters. Dissipation of heat from an optoelectronic device, such as a light emitting diode, is particularly important as the power output may decrease with a rise in operating temperature and permanent degradation (aging) of a light emitting device is an exponential function of the operating temperature. Conventional light emitting devices employ two electrical leads, which also serve as the heat conduction path to a heat dissipater. However, conventional optoelectronic devices exhibit substantial thermal resistance because of poor thermal coupling with the heat dissipater.
One approach obtains some improvement in the thermal performance by making the leads of highly conductive metals, such as copper. However, attaining full advantage of the highly conductive leads is prevented due to mounting problems. In particular, since most leads of most optoelectronic devices are soldered to traces on the circuit board, the heat from the soldering process can easily damage the optoelectronic device when the leads are highly thermally conductive. A previous approach seeks to address the problem by adhesively attaching the leads of a light emitting device to the traces on the circuit board. Various other approaches have been proposed to address the mounting of light emitting diodes and other optoelectronic devices for the purpose of heat dissipation.